


leaves of grass

by ssstrychnine



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anxiety, Baking, First Kiss, M/M, the two best tags ever in the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-09 04:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12268809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: stanley has trouble feeling safe. mike teaches him how to bake bread





	leaves of grass

After the sewer, Stan goes back to the things he knows best. He gets back from the hospital, swathed in soft white bandages, and he puts his room in order, sweeps out the floor and cuts lines into the sheets of his bed and rearranges his bookshelf. He’s exhausted, wrung out to dry, but the thought of going to sleep is scarier than anything else. If he sleeps he'll dream and if he dreams he’s not sure he’ll be able to wake up. There's calm in the straight lines of a clean room, so bright and clear there are no shadows, just his belongings, just the stuff he understands.

Eventually, he does end up in bed, with one of his bird books. It's a guide, something he'd gone through systematically the summer before. Collecting birds. He reads it all out loud, their common names and their Latin names and the little notes he's made in soft pencil.

“Ruby-throated hummingbird, archilochus colubris, spotted on Calgary Street drinking from a sunflower.” He touches the picture, adjusts his bandage, curls up on his side. He falls asleep with the book open under his hand and the lights on, and he doesn't dream.

They stay close that summer, even closer than they'd been before, the losers club, the lucky seven. They hang out at Bill’s house mostly, in the backyard, and Stan brings a blanket and spreads it out across the grass. He and Mike share it and Mike lies stretched out on his back, hands behind his head, eyes shut, and Stan makes loops of daisy chains.

“Who d’you love?” Richie asks, nodding at Stan, even though he isn’t pulling off any petals.

“Everyone but you, Rich,” says Stan, not looking up from his task. Next to him, Mike laughs, and Stan feels a rush of warmth for him. “Especially Mike,” he adds, quietly.

“Love you too, Stanny,” hums Mike, and it should be weird, that he can say that so easily, but it isn’t. Richie is pretending to gag but Stan doesn’t care about that either. He takes one of his daisy chains, drapes it over Mike’s forehead, his hair, and he opens his eyes and smiles like the sun above them.

They get older and closer still and even though Stan had been half-joking about the daisies, about love, he and Mike do have a particular sort of relationship. Mike joins them when they start high school, after a summer spent arguing about it with his grandfather, and it makes Stan feel a little more secure in himself, just seeing him in the hallways. He is fifteen and he still dreams about death, but Mike knows death too and he talks him out of his terror with quiet reason. He is sixteen and he’s still afraid every time he goes to the synagogue with his parents, but sometimes Mike comes to Shabbat prayers, sits warm against his side, and makes it easier. He’s seventeen and he has panic attacks when he can’t get the taps in the school bathrooms to turn off all the way, but Mike finds him there, and he stops the tap from dripping, and he talks to him, voice quiet and low, about what he’s been doing on his farm lately and about the books he’s reading, until Stan feels like he can breathe.

“Wanna cut last period?” he asks, one of these times, hand at the small of Stan’s back. “We can go to mine, I think I know something that might make you feel better.”

So they go to Mike’s, in his beat-up truck, out to where there’s more space to breathe. The last time Stan visited, Mike’s grandfather, William, had given him a pendant, a weird old coin with a loop of metal at the top, a swallow scored into one side, over the face of a president. Stan doesn’t know what it means, but he keeps it in his pocket, without a chain, and follows the outline of the bird with his thumbnail when he feels uncomfortable. It helps, somehow, like Mike helps. In return, Stan brings him his book, his guidebook of birds, with the pencil notes he made a thousand years ago. He’s not sure why, not really, but it seems like the right thing to do. It’s one of the only things he owns that means anything to him.

“You make these notes?” he asks, flipping through the pages.

“I... I collected birds,” says Stan, quietly. “When I was a kid.”

“Good thing to do,” he says, nodding. “Helps keep your thoughts in order. I used to collect trains, before the train yard shut down.”

“Did you know I liked birds when you gave me the coin?”

William laughs, and Stan can see Mike in his smile, golden warmth, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “You think I’m a seer, kid? It’s just something I found. I gave it to you because Mike likes you.”

“Sure, but he likes all our other friends too.”

“Not like he likes you.”

“Stop saying weird shit to Stan,” calls Mike, from the kitchen. “You’ll scare him off before he can help with the bread.”

“Not likely,” snorts William. “You don’t scare easy, do you?”

“I’m scared of everything,” says Stan, because it’s the truth, because he’s always scared.

“I doubt that,” he shrugs, rests his fingers against the seam of the pages. “You live in Derry, gotta be tough for that.”

In the kitchen, Stan and Mike make bread together. Mike says he's not that good at it, but to Stan it's kind of magic. It’s honey and yeast and oil and then flour, sunflower seeds, all piled up on a thick wooden chopping board. Stan gets to add the honey, golden and thick, and Mike mixes everything together at first, but then he passes it over.

“Knead it, like this,” he says, and he demonstrates, pushing the heel of his palm into the sticky dough and folding it over. Stan tugs his shirt a little straighter and folds back his cuffs more firmly. His first attempt is hesitant, careful, but Mike smiles, nudges his hands out of the way, fingers at his wrists, and shows him again.

“You can be rougher,” he says. “You can’t hurt it.”

Stan can’t think of the last time he made something from scratch, created it just for himself. When he was young, he made hamantash with his mother sometimes. She’d let him add the filling, cherry jam or poppy seed, and he would take it very seriously, adding exactly one and a half teaspoons to each pastry. That had stopped when they moved to Derry when Stan was seven, and there didn’t seem to be a reason for it, not exactly, it just stopped. A lot of things seem to stop with Derry.

He kneads the dough until Mike tells him to stop and Stan thinks it looks beautiful, perfectly rounded, pale gold, studded in sunflower seeds and sesame. They put it in a bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and leave it on the windowsill to rise. They go outside and everything is bright sun, the sky wide blue above them. It makes Stan feel clean and open and safe. It’s the polar opposite of the sewers, a place that he still dreams about, dark and close, the air thick with the smell of evil and of fear. There are white scars at the edges of his cheeks, near his ears, like teeth marks, and he can’t think about them without wanting to throw up.

They lie on the grass, no blanket, just warm earth. There are no daisies, but Stan doesn’t mind, he plucks at blades of grass and drops them onto the back of Mike’s hand, where he’s leaning back, making a small pile of green. Mike keeps still, he smiles, he watches Stan’s hands moving.

“I don’t give you anything,” says Stan, quietly, blowing air across the grass, tumbling it off Mike’s hand. “You’re always helping me, and I don’t... I don’t do anything for you.”

“That’s not true,” says Mike. He sits up a little straighter, rests his hands against his knees. “My family... we’ve always lived on the edges of Derry. No one invited us closer and people like the Bowers would... they didn’t want us in the city at all. You... you have lunch with me, walk with me to class at school, invite me to your house.” He laughs, and his eyes are bright in the sun, and his hands are soft against his knees. “You take me to your synagogue.”

“You’re my friend,” says Stan, like that’s the answer.  _ I want you in every part of my life _ , he thinks.

“Yeah,” says Mike. “Yeah, exactly.”

They go back inside a little later, to check on the dough. It’s swelled up to more than twice the size it was, huge and puffy and pale. Mike peels the plastic wrap from the bowl, throws it away, inspects the dough carefully.

“Okay, now you have to punch it,” he says.

“Like... with my hand?” Stan looks at the lump of dough dubiously.

“With your fist, Stanny,” says Mike. “Gets some of the air out, makes it better.”

So Stan punches it, and it’s soft, fluffy, sticky, and flour sprinkled over the top puffs up into the air, covering both he and Mike in a fine layer of white powder, and Stan doesn’t even care, doesn’t care that there’s bread dough under his nails and flour in his hair, because Mike is laughing.

“Punch it again,” he says, nodding at the bowl, and Stan does as he’s told and the dough flattens out a little, settles into something a little bit more solid. They pour it into a loaf tin, shape it, cut a stripe down the top, sprinkle it with sunflower seeds, and put it in the oven.

“Our child,” says Stan, kneeling down so he can peer through the oven door. “It’ll be disgusting, I bet.”

“It’ll be delicious,” says Mike. “You think I’d let your first loaf be disgusting?”

“No,” sighs Stan. “You probably wouldn’t.”

He stands up, dusts off his hands, and Mike is grinning at him and there’s flour on his face and in his hair and he looks like some kind of bakery angel. Stan doesn’t really think about it, just touches the pad of his thumb to Mike’s cheek, brushes off the flour there. Mike’s smile softens, becomes something so lovely Stan can hardly breathe.

“I-” he says, but his voice fails. He cups Mike’s face with his hand and Mike turns his head a little, presses his lips to Stan’s palm, hardly even a kiss, but enough. Stan stumbles closer, takes his hand away so he can throw his arms around his neck, and Mike’s hands settle at the small of his back, and Stan thinks he might start crying, but he doesn’t. 

Mike pulls back, but only to kiss him. He tastes like raw flour and a little bit like honey and Stan feels sort of like he’s finally found the right key to a lock he’s been unable to open for his whole life. Mike, with flour in his hair. Mike, with grass stains on the heels of his palms. They kiss, in the kitchen, warm from the oven and from the sun and from two boys together, afraid and unafraid and in love.

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for a prompt on tumblr. and idk why this ship isn't more popular but whatever. it's an important ship and i love it. thank you for reading! let me know what you think!


End file.
